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Unusually for a detective game, in Sid Sackson’s Sleuth you won’t care at all for the whodunnit. Your real focus is the whatismissing. And if you played any other of Sackson’s games before, you will already expect that figuring out even that is going to take some brain-sweat. And you’re perfectly right with that expectation, too.

Racing games often have a strong feeling of roll your dice and may the luckier one win. Not so Robo Rally. To triumph in this race, you’ll need a good sense of direction and an even better ability at planning your moves.

In 2050, running a global enterprise isn’t an easy job. Profit is still the top priority, of course, but because of government regulation and consumer behavior, you can no longer ignore sustainability issues. You either take care of the environment, of your employees and of society as a whole, or all the profits in the world won’t save your company. Balance between those concerns is not always easy, but if you run your company well it’s possible.

In an age of boardgames made of cardboard, some games stand out for their material. But a real wood cube as game “board” is not the only thing Master Thieves has to offer: you will also find a good amount of strategy and the greatest challenge to your memory and sense of direction I know about in any recent game.

Marie Cardouat’s game illustrations have always been in a style fitting for beautiful children’s books, and that is still just as true in HOP!. Beyond the illustrations, the game’s story is equally made for kids. After finding a book describing a magical kingdom in the sky, the child heroes of HOP! decide that they have to see the realm of magical creatures living in the clouds for themselves. And once that decision is made, it is a matter of moments before they are floating into the sky, each carried by a handful of balloons. And just like that you’re in the middle of a dexterity game for the whole family, and prettier than pretty much any other game out there.

Dungeon crawler games tend to be dice rolling festivals: you find a monster, you throw a die and either you die or the monster dies. Dungeon Fighter is not so different from that, only now you throw the dice on a target, and whether you hit or not is much more important than what face the die shows.

I admit, I didn’t expect that one day a traditional, competitive eurogame would be in the majority for the Kennerspiel des Jahres selection. But here we are, next to Pandemic Legacy and T.I.M.E. Stories, both cooperative games with a limited number of replays in the box Isle of Skye is the only competitive game with virtually unlimited replayability. Lets have a look if it’s worthy of the nomination.

Five years ago, the Lamont Brothers created a racing game with an uncommon setting. Snow Tails wasn’t about racing cars, motorcycles, speedboats or spaceships, it was about racing dog sleds. This year, they’ve returned to mushing with Mush! Mush! – Snow Tails 2, a new racing game that uses the same basic mechanics but is different enough to make it exciting again. And, as you expect from Fragor Games, it looks great as well.